Maui Pomare

Maui Wiremu Pita Naera Pomare (13 January 1876-27 June 1930) was the Reform Party of New Zealand MP for Western Maori from 1911 to 1930, succeeding Henare Kaihau and preceding Taite Te Tomo.

Biography
Maui Pomare was brn in Pahou Pa, New Zealand in 1876, and he attended Te Aute College, where he joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He studied medicine at the Church's college in Michigan, and graduated from there in 1899. On his return, in 1900 he became a government health officer in a Maori district, where he worked for improved sanitation and the registration of births and deaths. An MP for the "Young Maori Party" from 1911, he became Minister without Portfolio under William Massey in 1912, and Minister of the Cook Islands in 1916, where he instituted a number of economic, legal, and educational reforms. As Minister of Health in 1923, he reorganized care for the mentally ill and for lepers, and in 1926 he became Minister of Internal Affairs. Most of all he was remembered for his policies towards the Maori population, whose number had declined to their lowest level of 40,000 when he began his work in 1900, and which thereafter began to rise steadily, thanks in part to his sanitary, legal, and economic reforms.